Slipping away

Summer is really slipping away, between art camp and traveling. Art camp was a great success. The first group of kids was perhaps my most engaged and enthusiastic ever. The second week, well, I really wondered about them at first. Seated in front of paper and piles of crayons, all twelve of them just sat there. My helpers and I told them they could draw while we waited for everybody to arrive, and nobody bothered. I thought "oh dear, a week of this?" Who could imagine a dozen third graders with no interest in coloring? I suggested they do something with their names.....so a few wrote their names, and that was it.

As it turned out, these kids had great imaginations and remarkably long attention spans, they just weren't into drawing. I asked them to choose an animal, and I made them a wire armature of it and had it waiting for them the next morning - the wire is too stiff for little hands - then they built up the bodies with newsprint and tape, and we covered them with plaster gauze and painted them. I was amazed with their ideas and the fact that they happily spent an entire morning on this one project.

It never fails to interest me that classes of kids have a kind of groupthink.

printing on clay

I am a printmaker, not a potter, but have occasionally considered the possibilities of using my carved woodblocks to press into clay (after they have been editioned of course).

Just in the past week I have been thinking about it more, probably thanks to potter Cynthia Guajardo writing about the subject on her blog . No doubt she will come up with some lovely things for her etsy shop, so I'll be keeping track of her experiments and progress.

Then, on the always fun design blog Decor8, I read about the potter Nathan William and his collection that is impressed with vintage Indian woodblocks, then layers of glazes. The effect is very mysterious and textile-like. This Terracotta Sugar Jar is an example of his work from his Esty shop hijackedceramics.

I'm thinking more along the lines of using my old woodblocks to make my own mosaic tiles, something simple like that. I start week 2 of Art Camp tomorrow, and we'll start off with clay and paper mache (because it is raining daily, and that way things will have all week to dry!), so maybe I'll try something out. If so, I'll put up a picture.

testing

While taking a break from clearing things out of the family home, I've taken a couple of entertaining "personality tests". The first was on HGTV.com, a "Style" test - I came out "Eccentric with a touch of sweet", and then my "Personal DNA" report was that I am a "Respectful Creator".




both tests are fun and free.

Marc3

Much to my surprise I discovered today that my work appeared on the website Marc3. I don't know how it got there, and don't know much about the site because I do not read Spanish. Maybe once school starts again one of my students can read more about it for me. In any event, it is a very handsome site and I like the other art that is displayed there so I'm happy! It is like being in a group show except lots more people see the art.

I discovered it when it turned up as a "referring link" on StatCounter.

Art Camp starts tomorrow, and as usual I'll have second graders. My first year of doing art camp they whipped through my entire weeks' curriculum the first day!!! But I'm an old hand at it now, they only scare me a little. (Glitter fingerpaint is key----in Cyan, Magenta and Yellow, and they discover color mixing on their own, it is pretty fun) Hopefully I'll have to pictures to post.

Women in Art

Thanks to Judy Decker on the artsednet list for directing me to this wonderful thing.

part 2

The photos in this post and the one below are from this semester's Middle School students. We wove functional bags (the boys don't like me to call them purses) in the 6th grade (some are photographed with flaps open) and the 7-8th graders went completely crazy making sculptural figures from wire, masking tape and newspaper. I'll add more of those tomorrow, my school computer has no way to rotate images. (hard as that is to believe!) The bag to the right shows blending, egyptian knot, vertical stripes, and joining (the triangle), all required patterns, but of course they can make those patterns do whatever they want. This boy created his own pattern, using the yellow black and green in a very interesting way between the stripes and the triangle. I especially like the skull bag. The red eyes are a nice touch.

As for the figures below, there is a Sumo champion and a moment of drama between a smurf and a giant caterpillar that is attacking the smurf's toadstool home.

A few good pieces